E*TRADE requires your passport, alien, or government ID number to activate a new account

If you’re not a U.S. resident and you want to activate a new Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) account, E*TRADE requires your “passport, alien, or government ID number.”

From their printable form, “If you are a non-U.S. resident, please attach a photocopy of your passport or government-issued photo identification. We cannot activate your account without this documentation.”

On June 23, 2006, the New York Times reported how “U.S. Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror.”

It stated, “The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions.”

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to verify the identity of most non-U.S. resident applicants through their employers? Instead, mission creep has set in, with the expansion of tracking suspected members of “Al Qaeda,” to all non-U.S. residents, the overwhelming majority of whom are law-abiding.

This parallels the incrementalist expansion of the US-VISIT program, first instituted in 2004, to fingerprint individuals from select countries, was gradually expanded to visa-exempt countries like EU-member countries, then naturalized Canadian citizens, and even U.S. green card holders.

The U.S. State Department issues optional biometric passports to U.S. citizens, so it may just be a matter of time until the government has the fingerprints of every American citizen seeking to exercise his or her common law right to travel. That is, until the American public draws the line.

[…] Put The Oil Spill Over Your City/State/Province:COOL INTERACTIVE MAP HERE..(snippet) There was a second reason why this “currency” was doomed to fail, in spectacular fashion. Once the Dutch people acquired the knack for growing tulips, they could essentially be produced in infinite quantities. The Dutch people were about to learn an important lesson about money: in order for any form of money to hold its value over the long term, it must be “precious” or rare. Again referring to tulips, when they first became money, they were both rare and precious. They were originally few in number and since they were originally traded as flowers they were also beautiful (or “precious”). However, when the Dutch began to produce tulips in vast quantities and they also ceased to be “precious” (because they were now traded as bulbs), tulips lost the essential qualities of “good money” – and quickly became worthless. Regular readers will recall that I have previously provided the criteria for “good money” in previous commentaries. There are four necessary qualities which all money must possess, or else thousands of years of history teaches us that such “money” is doomed to fail as a currency. In addition to being “precious” or rare, good money must also be uniform, evenly divisible, and “a store of value”. The properties of being “uniform” and “evenly divisible” are basically self-explanatory, but I will spend a moment to illustrate the importance of money as a “store of value”. This refers to the requirement that “good money” must retain the wealth of the holder. For example, over a span of centuries, an ounce of gold has been sufficient to buy a fine, man’s suit. Conversely, the foolish Dutchman who traded his bed, a suit of clothes, and a thousand pounds of cheese for a tulip bulb, suddenly woke up one morning and realized that all he was holding as a replacement for that wealth was one, common flower. When discussing money as a “store of value”, we cannot fail to discuss how the U.S. dollar – the world’s “reserve currency” – has performed as a store of value. In the less than 100 years since the Federal Reserve was created to “protect” the dollar, it has lost more than 95% of its value. Put simply, the dollar of today is not “a store of value”, and thus not good money. The question then becomes: was the dollar ever “good money”, and (if so) what has changed over the last 100 years? More Here..E*TRADE Requires Your Passport, Alien, or Government ID Number to Activate a New AccountMore Here.. […]

Bob Chapman of The International Forecaster confirmed what I suspected. Namely, that all U.S. brokerages have this requirement. I referenced E*TRADE since they have the most explicit and publicly available mention of it.